The Bishop of Meath and Kildare, the Most Rev Richard Clarke, has warned that the church is seen as "irrelevant, frozen-hearted and hypocritical" to those outside the Ireland of wealth and power.
Addressing the Diocesan Synod of Meath and Kildare in Multyfarnham, Co Westmeath, at the weekend he also said that churchmen should stop "sniping at the soft targets - politicians for their dishonesty, tribunals for their apparent inability actually to achieve anything, the media for their smug cynicism . . .
"We should remember that the church is itself an even easier easy target for others - for our lack of integrity, for our inability to do much else than blather, for our own smug churchy brand of cynicism and begrudgery."
He warned there were now two Irelands. "On the one hand, an Ireland of wealth but also of underlying fear, and, on the other, an Ireland of deprivation, but a deprivation allied to bitter resentment".
He asked that the church be helped in its real role "in a society where people have become anonymous, where they are angry and fearful, a society where people feel vulnerable, where they feel distanced from decision-making."
It was not a role "which the church can fulfil by cosying up to the mighty of State and market," he said.
He believed the church must make itself vulnerable if it was to speak with integrity to those who had been made vulnerable.
He asked the diocese to continue its policy of giving 0.7 per cent of its total income to overseas aid, as a first call on that income, and urged public representatives to insist that the Government reach that target with GNP now, rather than in five years.
If not, millions of lives which might easily have been saved would have been lost to preventable disease and starvation.
On Christian ministry, Bishop Clarke said that, although the Church of Ireland was looking at the ministry, "it is, I rather fear, without any sense of either adventure or of radicalism.
" If our vision for ministry is only a seeking of ways to deal with a shortage of clergy, or if our dream for ministry is purely to find ways of conserving our finances or of preserving our buildings for the indefinite future, then the bad news is that there won't be any church to require either our finances or our resources."
